A marketing challenge of my own

Posted on August 22, 2007
Filed Under Internet Marketing

Sorry Ed, my interest in the 30 day challenge has left me. I tried. I swear. I tried. So, as of today, I believe I am officially out of the running for “winning” the 30 day challenge. However, I was able to get one of my content pages ranked in Google and since I didn’t use tumblr, my page is still up there in the rankings. I’m ranked about 120th, so I’m not exactly beating the visitors off with a stick, but, I think with some cultivating and linking, I can move up that ladder.

I’m not saying I didn’t learn anything from the 30DC. I learned quite a lot. I found a bunch of great tools, met some great people and found some killer new blogs to read.

So, after talking with Jason and Jake about this, I have decided to run a bit of a marketing challenge of my own. But, I’m going to do it slightly different. Rather than drag out the content for 2 weeks before showing you at all how to make money from the challenge, instead, I’m going to give you all the rules and ways to make money right up front! Novel concept, I know.

My challenge is not timed. My challenge has no prizes (except your own personal satisfaction). My challenge does not require you to spend zero money (though, you may not have to.) My challenge is… this:

Create your own niche site and generate your first affiliate sale through the use of article marketing.

“How do you do that?” you ask. Follow these steps:
1. Find your niche market
2. Find/purchase a domain name that fits your niche.
3. Set up hosting for the site.
4. Find an affiliate product to sell on your site (try cj.com or clickbank.com for products)
5. Install a CMS like WordPress or Drupal
6. Create initial content for the site (4 or 5 articles to get you started) - be sure to include links to your affiliate products in your articles, or banners in your site’s template.
7. Create articles to publish to article sites such as ezinearticles.com (be sure you create UNIQUE/QUALITY articles for each article site.)
8. Generate traffic to your site through the use of social bookmarking services (check out socialposter.com)

The idea is simple, get yourself in to the habit of creating worthwhile content that generates interest and therefore generates traffic and/or sales.

Here are the Rules:
1. Use your own domain name
This way, when you drive traffic to the site, no matter what, they are seeing your content. And, if your niche has other things to offer, you aren’t stuck with all your traffic going to a ridiculously narrow targeted page.

2. The domain must be new (or at least not already be in use)
The idea is for everybody to start on the same level playing field. If you have a domain name that already has 200 inbound links, that’s great… just don’t use it for this challenge.

3. You can not pay for traffic
Again, it’s fine to spend money on a new domain name and hosting if needed, but for the sake of this challenge, let’s leave the media buys and PPC campaigns for other sites.

Leave a comment or contact me and let me know if you are interested in taking part. You can start as soon as you like.

Knock ‘em dead!

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